Rolling Loud Co-Founder Discusses WWE Partnership, Crossover Between Fanbases

– Speaking to Complex, Rolling Loud co-founder Tariq Cherif discussed the Rolling Loud music festival partnering with WWE. Below are some highlights:

Cherif on the WWE partnership: “A lot of people on this team grew up fans of wrestling, and we love and respect what the WWE has built as far as their storylines and their brand and the way they’ve gotten this massive legion of diehard fans. They go to WrestleMania every year, and we’re building something similar over here. Granted, it’s different, but we have a lot of similarities, and we also have a lot of crossover fans. There’s a lot of hip-hop fans that are fans of wrestling. There’s a lot of wrestling fans who are fans of hip-hop. Hip-hop dominates all culture.”

Cherif on the crossover between wrestling fans and hip-hop: “It’s the No. 1 genre of music. It drives culture across all press points, from music to fashion to athletics to tech to charities. It doesn’t matter where you are, hip-hop has a major presence. So we have a lot of crossover fans thanks to hip-hop being so massive, and thanks to wrestling being so massive. We just thought it would be cool to mesh both worlds together and bring them into our world, expose them to our fans at the festival and on our stream. And we’ll be in turn exposed to their fans that tune into Fox on Friday night to watch Smackdown. It’ll be pretty cool.”

As previously noted, Friday Night SmackDown will be part of Rolling Loud Miami 2021 on Friday, July 23. This is the first ever collaboration between WWE and a major music festival.